Love and hamburgers: compatible or incompatible relationship?

Burgers: Hamburgers, fish burgers, turkey burgers, buffalo burgers, and burgers of all kinds are a staple of the omnivorous diet. People eat an untold number of hamburgers every day in countries around the world. However, do you think about the consumption of hamburgers, those derived from the death, actually murder, of living beings? Given that quantities of hamburgers were eaten every day in this world until ancient times, how many animals, fish and birds must be sacrificed to satisfy the appetites of those who crave hamburgers?

And love in relation to hamburgers? Have burger eaters ever thought about killing the animals they eat? Frankly, it’s impossible to talk about love, let alone be loving, and then eat a hamburger, fish burger, turkey burger, or any kind of meat-begotten meat.

Tukaram, the saint of Maharashtra, lived in the 17th century. he asks, The Lord dwells within each being. Does not man know that He also resides in the animals??

Tukaram’s question is valid, especially for people who align with spiritual values, values ​​intrinsically rooted in love and compassion. God is life. Human beings are not the only beings to whom God gives life or love. This begs the question, “If we love, how can we kill?”

George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright and 1925 Nobel Prize winner for literature, beautifully states:

Animals are my friends… and I don’t eat my friends.. This statement is fully expressed in his poem, “We are the living graves of slain beasts.”

We are the living graves of the slain beasts
Sacrificed to satisfy our appetites.
We never stop to marvel at our parties.
If animals, like men, can have rights.
We pray on Sundays so that we have light
To guide our steps on the path we tread.
We are tired of war. We don’t want to fight.
The thought of it now fills our hearts with dread,
And yet we tear ourselves apart over the dead.
As carrion crows we live and feed on meat
Regardless of suffering and pain
We provoke by doing it. if so we try
Defenseless animals for sport or profit.
How can we hope in this world to reach
the peace that we say we long for so much.
We pray for it over hecatombs of the dead
To God, while the moral law is outraged.
Thus cruelty begets its offspring, war.

Gloomy thought, isn’t it, this observation of Shaw’s? Kill and eat our friends? It’s not a pretty thought, much less a nice sight or commendable behavior. We pray for peace, but we participate in the slaughter of defenseless creatures only to consume their rotting and decomposing carcass. By doing so, we guarantee, through the law of sowing and reaping, cause and effect, karma, that we will experience the cruelty of war, a just reward for our own cruelty.

The 20th century saint, Charan Singh, asks: Where is the need to kill birds, fish and animals and make our body a graveyard? The human body, in which the Lord resides and which is the only species in which He can be realized, must be kept as pure and clean as possible… Animals, birds, etc., have not been created as food for humans. .. Plants have souls, insects have souls, birds have souls, animals have souls, and of course human beings have souls.

Charan Singh’s comment eradicates the delusional belief that animals, birds, fish and other creatures do not have souls and are therefore acceptable to eat. Therefore, we cannot use the excuse that other living things lack souls simply to justify killing and eating them.

Summary

Are love and hamburgers compatible? This article says: “Absolutely not!” If we are loving individuals, if we profess to love and follow a spiritual path, it is axiomatic that we cannot simply talk about love or be loving and then go eat a hamburger, a fish burger, a turkey burger or whatever. Regardless of how one tries to disguise it, there is no love in murder or in eating the sacrificed remains of living creatures. We can try to justify our actions until we are blue in the face and on our deathbed, but the plain and simple reality is that love has not, nor ever will have, anything to do with eating the flesh of living things.